Pursuit (2 page)

Poor Charlotte, I guess she finally just . . . broke down. Maybe I should have seen the
signs. She told me a couple of months ago she felt hunted, there were enemies
everywhere. She even told me she’d acquired an illegal weapon. A Smith & Wesson, I
think she said. She’s been acting very erratically, Anna. Said she hadn’t slept well in
months, and she was looking very poorly.

Who on earth could imagine it would come to this?

I sent my head of security to check on how Philip was doing in the hospital. We miss him
very much at the office. Conklin said he caught Charlotte smothering her father with a
pillow. I guess she just couldn’t stand to see him suffer anymore.
I’m sure she wasn’t herself when she shot that nurse. The stress was just too much for
her.

Here a slow sorrowful shake of the head. Sad, pensive expression.

What a waste, Anna. What a terrible waste.

Wonderful story. Played very well. It would play particularly well with Chief Brzynski. A month ago Haine hinted that Brzynski could count on a 200K-a-year job with Court Industries after retirement. It was all in place.

Now all that was missing was a dead Charlotte.

“Take her down, Conklin. I want men around her house and in a perimeter around police headquarters. Tell your men to shoot on sight. Make sure you get to the body before the cops do and plant that gun on her. Fold her fingers around it. Say she was drawing on you and you shot in self defense.” Haine stopped and did some calculations. The amount had to be just right. Enough to be a strong motivator but not so much they’d be too eager to take precautions. “Tell the men there’s a thirty-thousand-dollar bonus for the one who bags her.”

Haine disconnected and started dressing to go out. It was snowing. He hesitated a moment. The cashmere Armani overcoat would get soaked. Better to go with the Shearling.

Warrenton, New York

February 20

Fill it up!”

Charlotte Court buzzed down the window of her maid’s SUV and shouted over the howling wind at the gas-station attendant. She was shaking with shock and pain and grief, huddled in her down jacket against the icy sleet pinging against her face. Underneath the jacket, blood was seeping out of the makeshift bandage she’d packed against the bullet wound. Her heart was also bleeding grief for her father, still and dead on his hospital bed, murdered by one of Robert’s minions. Of the shocks of the past two hours, that was the worst—knowing her father was dead.

She needed a safe place to hole up. Robert’s men had been at the police station and had surrounded her home. The profile of an armed man outside the gates of her home had been visible against the dying light. Whatever was going on, she needed to get away from Robert, get medical attention, then call in the murder of her father and the attack on her life to the FBI.

A motel was a possibility. She was driving her maid’s SUV. Moira had even left her brandnew American passport in the glove compartment, so she could check into the hotel as Moira Charlotte Fitzgerald. Then from there she could call . . .

Charlotte jumped as a face with a straggly moustache plastered itself against the passenger-side window. “That’ll be seventy bucks, ma’am,” the man screamed against the wind.

Charlotte bumped her left shoulder against the door in turning toward her purse and nearly blacked out from the pain. She had to breathe slowly through her nose until the worst had passed. Thank God she was wearing black. Blood from the wound had seeped slowly through the down jacket and left a red, wet sheen on the left-hand-side door. No credit card. Whatever Robert was up to, he had the resources to track credit-card payments. So she handed most of the small amount of cash she had over to the attendant and drove around to the side of the station.

The restrooms were way in the back, past rows of shelves with junk food, soda pop, maps, and movie magazines. Were there any OTC medications? A couple of aspirin might just dull the pain a little. Or even better, ibuprofen.

She heard her father’s name mentioned and another stab of grief nearly brought her to her knees. Her eyes welled, her heart thumped painfully at the thought that she’d never see her father again.

Then another name caught her attention.

To her horror, someone was calling her name! Charlotte cringed, ready to run, when she realized that except for a very bored young teen bopping her head to the beat of an iPod, she was alone in the shop.

What . . . ?

Her name was being blared from the TV fixed to a bracket high up on the wall. There was a big-hair female anchor. A photograph of Charlotte was in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen.

Police are on the lookout for Charlotte Court, heiress to Court Industries. She is wanted for
questioning in the death of her father, Philip Court of Court Industries at Parkwood
Hospital and the shooting death of Imelda Delgado, a trauma nurse at the hospital. Police
warn that Ms. Court may be armed and must be considered dangerous. Anyone sighting
Ms. Court is warned not to approach her but to contact the authorities at . . .
Oh my God!
She was wanted for
murder!
Not only did she have to escape Robert and his goons, she had to avoid the police!
Armed and dangerous.
They’d shoot her on sight. And worse—Robert was friends with the chief of police. If she were in custody, he’d find a way to get to her.

Charlotte made it back to the SUV, gasping with panic. She pulled out of the gas-station lot as quickly as the ice on the road allowed and headed west, hoping to make it across the state line before she fainted.

By nightfall, Haine was pacing, impatiently waving away his housekeeper’s offer of dinner. The bitch had gotten away. He didn’t know how she had done it, but she’d disappeared off the face of the Earth.

She couldn’t get far, though. She hadn’t been back to Court Mansion, so she wouldn’t have much money. The instant she used her credit card, they’d be on top of her. He’d spent the day at police headquarters, and an APB had been put out for one Charlotte Court, suspected of murder, considered armed and dangerous.

The state police would be alert, but Haine trusted Conklin’s men more than he trusted the police. Conklin’s men were good—they were fast, and they were ruthless. They’d find her first and deliver a corpse.

It wouldn’t be long. Charlotte was wounded and on the run, the object of a manhunt. No, Haine thought with a slow smile. A womanhunt.

Somewhere in Kansas

Crest Motor Court

February 24

Charlotte Court stared at her pale, exhausted face in the cracked, spotted bathroom mirror. Her skin was paper white, except for the patchy red fever flags on her cheekbones. Whatever her temperature was, she didn’t want to know. All she knew was that it was high. Fever floated in her veins, making her light-headed, slightly hallucinatory. For a moment, there were two white-faced Charlottes reflected in the dark-spotted mirror with the backing nearly completely eaten away on the left-hand side.

The only good thing about looking like someone about to circle the drain was that she bore no resemblance whatsoever to the photograph that until two days ago had been broadcast over every TV station on Earth, it seemed. The photograph had been taken at the Red Cross charity ball, and she’d spent an entire day at Elizabeth Arden’s in preparation. The white-faced woman staring back at her in the mirror bore no resemblance to the polished, coiffed, bejeweled, heavily made-up woman in the photograph.

Right now, she looked ten years older, ten pounds lighter, and $10 million poorer than in the photograph. Last night, somewhere in Illinois, she’d washed her hair one-handed. The motel’s hairdryer didn’t work, so she’d fallen into bed with her hair wet. It was a universe away from Pierre’s frothy coiffure, which had taken him all afternoon to concoct before the charity ball.

The Red Cross ball photograph had migrated all over the newspapers over the past four days. It had been front-page, above-the-fold news the first day. Then it had slipped to below the fold, then onto page three, from color to black and white, and had finally disappeared altogether while several other news cycles cranked their way through the public consciousness.

The story of Charlotte Court, double murderer, had become a low background hum by the time she made it to Chicago.

That was good because she didn’t have the strength to do much more than keep her head down whenever she saw a security camera. And she’d run out of money. She’d almost run completely out of cash and had coasted to her Great Aunt Willa’s street on fumes. Great Aunt Willa, bless her heart, had passed away at Christmas, leaving everything she owned to Charlotte, who had been unwilling to leave her father to settle the estate. Great Aunt Willa had been rich and, even better, crazy as a loon. One of her eccentricities was to always keep vast amounts of cash on hand. What she called “walking around money.”

Charlotte had the keys to Great Aunt Willa’s house—technically her house, now—because she’d been meaning to take a quick trip to Chicago when her father’s health allowed it, and it never had.

After a morning’s search, she found Aunt Willa’s stash. A little under fifty thousand dollars in cash in four shoeboxes in Aunt Willa’s walk-in closet that could have housed a family of four.

As she closed the door of the big mansion behind her, she vowed that she would one day return, with a cleared name. Her next step was a Western Union wannabe in a poor part of town, where migrant workers sent their wages back home to their families. She chose the scruffiest remittance counter she could, with the most bored-looking employees. They didn’t even question it when Moira Charlotte Fitzgerald sent nine thousand to Moira Charlotte Fitzgerald in Warrenton, New York. The same for another remittance agency several blocks away. In all, she sent Moira eighteen thousand dollars, which is what her SUV had cost her.

She’d made off with Moira’s pride and joy. Moira had saved two years for that black monster. Charlotte couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t pay Moira back. Once she’d wired the money, she put the two receipts in an envelope and mailed them to Moira’s home, disguising her handwriting. The process exhausted her. Her only consolation was that, after buying a second hand huge, shapeless, hooded down coat in a Goodwill that reached to her ankles, a black wool watch cap and enormous sunglasses, her own father wouldn’t have recognized her.

Security cameras were everywhere these days, she knew. So if by chance she was on film somewhere, the camera had caught images of a woman moving so slowly she could have been eighty years old, dressed in a shapeless coat, with a hood and sunglasses. No one could ever have recognized her as Charlotte Court.

Time and distance from Warrenton were taking her farther and farther away from immediate danger. And the shoulder wound was making her look less and less like Charlotte Court, heiress and socialite.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the wound had become infected, and the infection wasn’t showing any signs of going away.

Exhaustion made her sway slightly. She clutched the dirty edges of the washbasin for balance. One look at the moldy Fungus City pad in the plastic shower stall had her opting for a sponge bath. The faucet yielded up a reluctant gurgle of yellowish, warmish water. By the time she finished cleaning up, she could barely stand.

Oh, God, she missed her father fiercely. Of course, he wouldn’t have been much help in this particular instance. Philip Court was—had been—notoriously impractical. He wasn’t too good at dressing bullet wounds or evading cops, but he knew how to comfort. Her father seemed to have had a book to recommend for every life event. She couldn’t count the times she’d felt better just by having him hug her and fix a cup of tea. A single tear ran down the pale, drawn face in the mirror. If she dwelled on how much she missed her father, she’d lose the last of her reserves, and there was still one more task to face before she could sleep, though bile rose in her throat at the thought. She stood naked in the bathroom, feet curling on the cold, damp tiles. Charlotte stared at her shoulder, at the bloodstained gauze that had been pristine white that morning, hating what was coming next. The first time she’d tried to tough it out, tearing the bloody packing off in one decisive, painful rip, she’d woken up half an hour later on the bathroom tiles with a huge bump to her head.

Still, experience told her that it was better to do it in one go. Her right hand lifted to her left shoulder and with a decisive, painful rip, she tore the bloody packing off and clenched her teeth to stifle the scream. The fiery pain made her head swim and her stomach clench. Luckily, there was nothing in her stomach to throw up.

It was worse than yesterday. She leaned forward and examined her shoulder carefully in the mirror. Yes, it was definitely worse. The wound hadn’t closed completely yet. It still suppurated sullenly, blood leaking out at a slow but constant pace. Part of it had scabbed over, but she could see pus at the edges of the scab. The skin was raw and red, inflamed and painful to the touch. To her horror, she could see a small streak of red angling downwards.

So far she’d managed without stitches, but the infection was getting out of control. At a loss for antibiotics, she’d remembered going to a farmer’s supply store when her collie, Yeats, had caught his paw in a hunter’s trap. The store hadn’t blinked at selling her antibiotics over the counter. So Charlotte had stopped that morning in one of the thousand anonymous small farming towns in Illinois and had bought antibiotics for a nonexistent collie weighing sixty pounds. That way all she had to do was double the dosage the friendly man behind the counter had given her.